A high percentage of migrant students are not meeting state content standards in readability and legibility within a small independent school district located in California's Central Valley. Prior research indicates that if a student is not proficient in reading skills by the 5th grade, academic success will not be attained effecting the student, parents, educators, and economics of the community. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative case study was to explore the teaching strategies that were used to help migrant students increase their reading comprehension skills. This study has its theoretical basis in the learning theories of Dewey, Slavin, and Yousevand which hold that students need to be active participants in the learning process. This case study was guided by the following areas of inquiry: (a) identifying training and strategies used by teachers, (b) identifying the specific obstacles, (c) identifying methodologies, and (d) how these methodologies address the specific challenges of migrant children. A semi-structured interview schedule, observations of 5 Language Arts classes, and field notes were used as data collection tools. Interviews were conducted and included 5 English teachers, 1 principal, 1 guidance counselor, and 1 community liaison. The data were analyzed and coded with common themes. The key results confirmed (a) varied teacher perceptions of differentiated instruction, (b) language and cultural barriers, (c) lack of knowledge and vocabulary, (d) minimal parent involvement, and (e) financial issues and mobile lifestyle. This project study informed specific recommendations for a Saturday computer lab incorporating computer-assisted instruction. The outcomes of this study have implications for social change for migrant and ELL students by empowering them to more effectively participate and make positive contributions to the global community.

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) have difficulty with most reading skills, including reading comprehension (Hulme & Snowling, 2011). Improving reading comprehension skills requires efficient interventions that consider both meaning- and code-based skills simultaneously. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design across participants, with alternating treatment design, this study compared two reading interventions (repeated reading vs. tablet text-to-speech) combined with a meta-cognitive strategy (question generation). Three fourth-grade and third-grade students who had been diagnosed by their school as having reading difficulties (reading one to two grades behind their expected reading levels) participated in the study. Using the index of narrative complexity (Labov, 1973; Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008) as a major dependent variable, two participants showed improvement in reading comprehension skills as measured by visual analysis and the effect size between means. However, there were slight differences for the RAAC intervention over the tablet intervention for one participant. The time required to administer the tablet intervention was shorter than the time required to administer the RAAC intervention (an average of 12.73 minutes for the RAAC vs. 5.45 minutes for the tablet), which is an important consideration when deciding to use an intervention.

Purpose: This study investigates one possible reason for individual differences in vocabulary learning from written context. A Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model is used to motivate the prediction of a causal relationship between semantic knowledge for words in a text and the quality of their hypotheses about the semantics of novel words, an effect mediated by reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to test this prediction behaviorally, using a within subject repeated measures design to control for other variables affecting semantic word learning. Methods: Participants in 6th grades (n=23) were given training to increase semantic knowledge of words from one of two texts, counterbalanced across participants. After training, participants read untreated and treated texts, which contained six nonword forms. Measures were taken of reading comprehension (RC) and the quality of the readers' hypotheses about the semantics of the novel words (HSNW). Text difficulty and semantic informativeness of the texts about nonwords were controlled. Results: All participants had increases in semantic knowledge of taught words after intervention. For the group as a whole, RC scores were significantly higher in the treated than untreated condition, but HSNW scores were not significantly higher in the treated than untreated condition. Reading comprehension ability was a significant moderator of the effect of treatment on HSNW. A subgroup of participants with lower scores on a standardized reading comprehension measure (n=6) had significantly higher HSNW and RC scores in the treated than untreated condition. Participants with higher standardized reading comprehension scores (n=17) showed no effect of treatment on either RC or HSNW. Difference scores for RC and difference scores for HSNW were strongly related, indicating that within subjects, there is a relationship between RC and HSNW. Conclusions: The results indicate that for a subgroup of readers with weaker reading comprehension, intervention to enhance lexical semantic richness had a substantial and significant effect on both their reading comprehension and on the quality of hypotheses that they generated about the meanings of novel words. Neither effect was found for a subgroup of readers with stronger reading comprehension. Clinical and educational implications are discussed.

Denna litteraturstudie belyser arbetssätt samt metod där i undervisningen med anknytning till kooperativt lärande och läsförståelse samt hur detta påverkar elevernas samspel och interaktion. Användningen av kooperativt lärande i klassrummet varierar beroende på lärarens engagemang. Syftet med denna studie är att belysa hur kooperativt lärande behandlas som metod för att utveckla elevers läsförståelse och samspel i grundskolan för årskurs F-3. Syftet avses svaras med hjälp av följande frågeställningar: Hur ser relationen ut mellan kooperativt lärande och läsförståelse? Vilka möjligheter och hinder finns med kooperativt lärande i undervisningen? Frågeställningarna besvaras med hjälp av 13 stycken vetenskapliga artiklar. Forskningen är mestadels internationell och utförd i flera olika delar av världen. Resultatet på användandet av kooperativt lärande i klassrummet visade på ökade resultat i läsförståelse samt ökad interaktion och samspel mellan eleverna. Faktorer som påverkade användandet av kooperativt lärande var bland annat klassrumsklimatet, både den psykiska och fysiska, resurser, lärarens kunskap och engagemang. Genom strukturerad undervisning i och om användandet av kooperativt lärande kan det öka elevers läsförståelse samt samspel och interaktion. För att kooperativt lärande ska ha en positiv inverkan på undervisningen är lärarens kunskap och engagemang avgörande.

The authors suggest that students need to become physically as well as academically involved in their learning. In this light, there are procedures presented for having students make stick puppets that can be used in a variety of learning activities including, but not limited to, readers' theatre and story retelling. We propose that fables can provide a good foundation for developing activities featuring stick puppets, speaking and reading fluency oriented activities. We enncourage teachers and librarians to help make the puppets in order to incorporate first-hand knowledge of the procedures for their students.

Readers’ theater can provide an enjoyable foundation for students to become more fluent readers. In addition, children must become physically and emotionally, as well as academically, involved in learning to read. Procedures arepresented for having students perform plays and engage in 1. artistic endeavors, 2. performance reading, 3. social interaction, 4. repeated readings, and 5. story retelling. Suggestions presented herein are appropriate for application in a variety of learning environments and with many types of literature.

Review of the studies in the area of subvocalization reveals that its role in silent reading comprehension remains in question. It appears clear that subvocalization does occur during reading, usually among poorer readers or as reading becomes more difficult, and that it slows the reading process. However, how it affects reading comprehension, or if it affects reading comprehension, remains unclear. This study attempted to answer the question of whether subvocalization affects reading comprehension in an adult community-college population. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of subvocalization on the reading comprehension of the community college students in developmental reading programs.

abstract: Temporal adverbial clauses are present in many forms of writing. These clauses can impact the complexity of a sentence. Sentence complexity can have some effect on how readers with a diagnosed reading disability, such as dyslexia, process language. This study incorporated Hawkins’ (1994) theories about Early Immediate Constituency into a self-paced reading task designed to evaluate whether or not temporal adverbial clause positioning caused the main clause of the sentence to become more difficult to understand. Hawkins theorized that main clauses appearing at the beginning of a sentence would create an environment where a reader could reach sentence comprehension faster (CITE). The experiment used software called Linger to present the self-paced reading task. Eight participants – four with dyslexia and four without – volunteered to read sentence items from a college level textbook that had temporal adverbial clauses appearing before and after the main clause of sentences. Statistical significance in the findings show that participants read sentences more quickly when the temporal adverbial clause appeared before the main clause; however, more research is required to determine the difference between sentences fronted by adverbial clauses and sentences fronted by main clauses. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2020

This paper is an overview of current research on teaching mathematics. The question to answer through studying research on the matter is how are language development strategies used in mathematical learning? The subsequent questions that we posed were why is it important with language development to learn math, how do students learn the language in mathematics, how does the use of language affect the possibility to learn mathematic and finally how are multilingual students’ possibilities to learn mathematics affected? The method used is reading and discussing  various sources of research in the field, using a few key words and refining the search as sources are used to find new keywords.  Through the research we have been able to answer the posed questions. Our main question is impossible to answer in one sentence, but what can be said is that there are language development strategies that play a role in mathematics learning and that they may vary from school to school, or even teacher to teacher. It is clear, however, that language development and using the language in education is crucial for learning new concepts and to communicate ideas, solutions and understanding in mathematics. In order for this development to take place it is necessary to actively use and practise using the language during mathematics learning. The teacher plays an important role to communicate this precise language and to encourage its students to practise to use it in order to communicate effectively.

Many students on the autism spectrum display a strong ability to process and comprehend information at elevated levels when presented with it visually. Despite this, students who have autism are increasingly being educated in general education content classrooms that utilize lessons directed to whole groups of students and limit the use of visually presented material. For some students with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this presentation introduces difficulties related to attention as well as comprehension and retention of material. Research indicates promising results associated with using a graphic organizer to increase comprehension accuracy in students who answer wh-questions following the reading of a short passage. The purpose of this study was to document the relationship between using a graphic organizer and increasing reading comprehension. The study employed a single-subject multiple baseline design across participants to evaluate if the use of a graphic organizer impacted the correctness of answering wh-questions for grade-level social studies content. Participants included four eighth grade students in an urban public school who had been diagnosed with ASD. Results supported research by showing an increase in comprehension skills with the use of a graphic organizer.